Small Companies Can Use Big Data Too, AgilOne and Shaklee Speak at GrowthBeat

August 07, 2014

Dominique Levin, CMO of AgilOne, and George Shehata, CRM of Shaklee (a nearly 60 year old health products retailer), discussed how small companies, not just large corporations, can use big data too in a discussion moderated by Kobe Fuller of Accel Partners at VentureBeat's GrowthBeat conference yesterday.

"The point is you don't even need ‪data scientists anymore to really understand your data,” said Levin. [Click to Tweet]

Shehata talked about how all of the information is already at a company’s fingertips, they just need to start by ‘picking the low hanging fruit’, which companies like AgilOne help them to do for a fraction of the cost of having in-house data scientists.

“In simple terms, [predictive marketing] is taking the information you have to make a message more relevant, which is good for the customer and the good part for us is hopefully they buy more,” said Shehata, when asked what these terms mean to him.

So how can companies get started? Levin said most of the companies have the data on their customers available to them, they just don’t have the tools to tap into it. Which is where a company like AgilOne comes in.

Shehata said you have to start small, run tests and through your results you will be able to convince leadership within your company that this really does work.

“Seeing 50% increases in engagements and other lifts has proven that this really works.” Shehata said.

In one instance Shaklee was able to repurpose old communications to target a new group of customers they found through AgilOne and generated three times the lift.